The Irascible ProfessorSMIrreverent Commentary
on the State of Education in America Today

by Dr. Mark H. Shapiro

"We
are more apt to catch the vices of others than their virtues, as disease
is far more contagious than health."... ...Charles Caleb Colton

Commentary
of the Day - April 8, 2001: Salmonella Burgers! Is That
Dumb-ya or Not?

During the past
two-and-a-half months Dubya has been doing his best to reward the business
interests that supported him in his quest for the White House. Even
though he got a late start in putting together his team owing to
the Florida election debacle, he promised to hit the ground running when
he got to Washington. He sure has lived up to that promise.

In less than three
months a host of federal rules and regulations aimed at protecting the
environment and the health and safety of Americans have either bitten the
dust or are on their way out. These include regulations to reduce
repetitive stress injuries, regulations to prevent contractors who violate
federal labor and fraud laws from bidding on government contracts, regulations
to reduce the amount of arsenic in drinking water, regulations that would
reduce CO2 emissions and other "greenhouse" gases, regulations
that would increase the energy efficiency of electric appliances, etc.
And, of course, there is that little business of opening up the Alaskan
National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.

To be sure, there
are arguments on both sides of each of these cases. However, it seems
that business interests have been paramount in almost all decisions made
by the current administration. For example, the Texas energy bandits
have taken advantage of energy shortfalls in California to gouge consumers
mightily. Electric energy is being sold to the state's power grid
on the spot market at up to ten times the cost of production. So
far, Bush's Federal Energy Commission has done nothing to control these
windfall profits.

However, it looks
like Dubya and his cronies finally went a bit too far. It seems that
for the past year or so the government has had a "zero-tolerance" policy
for salmonella in the ground beef destined for school lunch programs.
Since that policy was established some 120 million pounds of ground beef
have been tested for salmonella, and about 5 million pounds of were found
to contain the bacteria and were rejected.

Under pressure
from the beef industry, the Department of Agriculture had proposed to eliminate
the requirements for salmonella testing. They would have been replaced
by rules requiring the tracking of a harmless strain of e coli bacteria
that presumably would serve as an indicator of poor hygiene during the
preparation of ground beef. The Department also proposed rules that
would have allowed meat processors to irradiate beef in order to sterilize
it. The meat packers had argued that salmonella testing was too costly,
and that the bacteria is killed in the cooking process provided that the
hamburgers are cooked until the internal temperature reaches 160º
F.

Consumer advocates
had argued that the chief danger from salmonella contamination comes not
from undercooking the burgers, but in the food handling process itself.
In busy school cafeterias it is relatively easy for staff to accidentally
cross-contaminate food items, such as lettuce and tomatoes, that will not
be cooked before being served. This is something that the Irascible
Professor agrees happens frequently enough to be cause for concern.

Many of the same
consumer advocates have argued against the use of radiation to sterilize
meat. This process uses high doses of gamma radiation to kill bacteria
in meat. Decades of research have shown that this is an entirely
safe process that actually would benefit public health if it were widely
used. Unfortunately, the public perception of anything related to
radiation is so negative that this process has not been widely adopted.
The irradiation process does not make the beef radioactive, although there
is a very slight degradation in nutritional value.

Well, giving the
raspberry to labor over ergonomic rules and union contracts is one thing,
but messing with the school lunch program is another as G.W. now has learned.
Not since Ronald Reagan and company tried to classify ketchup and relish
as vegetables in the federal school lunch program has there been such a
reaction. The Bush administration spent some time this past Thursday
in the midst of a full-scale international crisis backpedaling on the school
lunch issue. Bush's press secretary (the appropriately named Ari
Fleischer) claimed that this all was the doing of low-level officials in
Agriculture, and that the Bush administration would never do anything to
jeopardize the health of America's school kids.

Give it another
week and they might even reconsider that decision on arsenic in drinking
water.